Andersonville (13 page)

“Wirz is our man,” Barclay said with certainty.

“I don't know,” said Day. “A slave doctor on a sugar plantation?”

“A slave doctor with powerful friends. Winder, Jeff Davis? Who knows who he met with in Europe. Lot of old magic there. Lot of people looking over the pond with an eye on who wins and who loses over here. And we don't even know who Wirz was before he came over. He could've been a magician all along. Maybe he's just a good actor.”

“Well, if it is Wirz, we're going to have a problem getting close to him.”

They heard the sound of many feet and rattling accoutrements up ahead and ceased talking as a group of soldiers marched up the path, a swinging lantern in the lead sergeant's hand. Night patrol.

They saluted Day as they passed, and he returned the gesture.

“We better get that wood to the barracks,” he said when they'd passed. “Come on.”

They steered toward the faraway light of the train depot on the other end of the gauntlet of torches through the forest, and Barclay remembered to drop the broomcorn from the protection spell at the crossroads.

“Why's it a problem getting close to Wirz?” Barclay asked.

“My duties just don't take me near the man. He's the commandant of the interior. I report to General Winder. Wirz stays in a house with his wife and daughter three miles out past the graveyard, and he doesn't mingle with the other officers.”

“I saw that house,” Barclay said, remembering it from earlier that day.

“If I could observe him more closely, maybe I could identify the entity he's communing with.”

They reached the guarded train depot, crossed the tracks, and passed down the dark, quiet streets of Andersonville. They went in silence to the officers' barrack. Barclay noted a few sentries posted throughout the town.

Day instructed him to lay the kindling on the pile outside, and then they turned and headed back into the woods without incident.

“I just wonder,” Day mused, “Wirz, or Winder, what're they actually planning to do here?”

“Well,” said Barclay. “I remember something your father told us once. He said that the balance of the forces of good and evil is decided by humanity's actions.”

“Chayyim Vital,”
Day said. “It's a Jewish concept. Angels are born from every good deed, and each of mankind's sins creates a demon.”

“So maybe the prison is meant to amplify sin and evil, muster a demonic force to sway the war,” Barclay said.

“For whom?” Day asked.

Barclay almost laughed at his serious look of befuddlement.

“For the South. Who else?”

“Knights of the Golden Circle, maybe?” Day said. “Or some hidden faction we don't even know about.”

Barclay was aghast.

“You don't think Jefferson Davis would authorize someone to use supernatural means to win the war? You're going to need a damned miracle if you hope to win, after all.”

“I know it for a fact,” Day said indignantly. “I was inserted here clandestinely to ascertain the rumors of prisoner abuse. The government has no knowledge of anything untoward and certainly would never resort to dark ritual magic or demonic pacts. We're a God-fearing Protestant nation.”

Barclay scoffed. “Yes, fine upstanding Christians all.”

“As I recall, there was a time when you considered yourself one of us.”

“There was, yes. I'm ashamed to say it now.”

“You're ashamed of your home?”

“My home!”
Barclay snapped angrily, stopping in the road. “I have no home anymore. It took the betrayal of all my friends and neighbors, my
white
‘friends,' to show me the truth. The soul of Dixie is rotten through and through, encased in a putrid body of cotton and sugar plants drinking the blood of my poor people from the soil. Material comfort made my family, made
me,
blind to it before. A Negro has no business wearing the gray. General Sherman is visiting the curse of the pharaohs on the South. The Confederacy stands against God.”

“You've certainly a high opinion of your adopted homeland,” Day muttered bitterly.

“I told you, I have no home.” He glared up at Day. “You and yours made sure of that.”

“You've fallen prey to Unionist propaganda, my friend. What do you think your northern friends will do with you if they beat us? Do you think you'll have your house in New Orleans back? They'll ship you, educated free men and bullet-headed field niggers alike, off to some blighted speck of feral coastland in Panama or Liberia. The Black Republic, maybe. Someplace to which you're ill suited, where the indigenes won't want you, but where you're nicely out of the way.”

“And what do you offer the Negro, Quit? A sturdy set of shackles, corn bread, and the lash? More blasphemous propaganda about how God entrusted the black man to your tender but firm care? Have you seen the way Negroes are treated here in Georgia? In Alabama? I've felt the slaver's godly care firsthand on my back. Have you ever been
flogged
?”

Day bit his lip and started to say something, but a line of men came marching up the road from the direction of the stockade, the lights of which now loomed.

It was the night patrol, returning from the gate.

They saluted Day again, but as they passed, Barclay heard a few of the privates mumble something and stifle laughter.

“I do wish you had not told Turner I was after buggering you.”

“Well, if wishes were horses, I'd be up where you are,” Barclay said.

“We'll have to limit our contact from here on in,” Day said.

“Agreed,” Barclay said. “I'm already enduring too much scrutiny from too many different parties. We'll have to find another way to communicate.”

“Writing in Creole was a good idea,” Day said, “but if you have to write me another letter, use an Augustus Caesar cipher.”

Barclay nodded. Quitman's father had taught them the Caesar ciphers from Suetonius during their classical education.

Day ordered the wicket opened, and Barclay went back inside.

Barclay heard Turner speaking to the sentries, jeering, but he paid it no mind.

He walked idly, thinking. Turner and Wirz, with their limited view of Negroes, perhaps suspected nothing of him anymore. His beating had satisfied their curiosity.

But among the Union prisoners, Clemis, Wilderbeck, Doctor John, Bill, and Charlie especially, though she had kept his secret once, were liabilities to his mission. The existence of the Raiders and of men like Chickamauga already showed that the desperation of the conditions in the stockade could very easily turn them against one another, let alone him, a Negro and still a relative newcomer.

He had to comport himself with more care from here on in if he was to learn just what malevolent force was behind all this suffering. Maybe he could use his tutoring of Red Cap to his advantage. Maybe he could dictate his letters to the boy and have him mail them in his stead.

His most recent letter would be his last for a while. The missive, to a nonexistent brother in Richmond, would arrive at a bakery at 811 North 5th Street, where a man he knew only as Quaker was trained to spot the ciphers he had written into it: telltale ciphers devised by Allan Pinkerton and shared by dozens of Union agents in the South. The letter would find its circuitous way to New York City, where Hattie Lawton, his coordinator, a woman he had gone through hell at Castle Thunder to rescue, would read the coded message:

In place.

Signed, Joseph Danger

His code name, Joseph Danger.

He had selected that name with great care. It was a reference to the
Rada lwa
Papa Loko, traditionally considered the first
houngan
priest and guardian of the
reglemen,
the complex sacred rites of vodoun. Papa Loko was known to all as the patron of healers and root doctors, but his father had told him that he was also the secret patron of their family line, that the man Loko had been in life before becoming one of the Invisibles had been the first of their bloodline to cross the ocean from Dahomey ages ago, the first to bring the sacred knowledge to the West.

Joseph Danger was the name the people gave to Papa Loko's fiery
Petro
incarnation, the aspect of the
lwa
who, when enraged, could use his powers to do harm and to punish.

Hattie Lawton would pass his message on to the man who had given him his mission, John Scobell.

Scobell was an educated ex-slave from Mississippi, a former agent of Allan Pinkerton, and the man who had trained Barclay. After Pinkerton's resignation as intelligence chief for General McClellan and his own wounding during a mission with Hattie Lawton, Scobell had offered his services directly to Washington, and under cover as an antislavery lecturer, he now coordinated a network of black dispatches for the Union.

Several months after the Castle Thunder affair, Barclay had been recuperating in New York City without purpose, soliciting both Scobell's and the new intelligence chief Lafayette Baker's office for assignment and considering striking off on his own when finally he'd received word to report to a certain address.

He recalled walking into the rich apartments and being led into a red-curtained drawing room, where he'd found Scobell, dark as night and leaning on his cane, his hair whitening at the edges, with another gentleman, a bearded white man with wavy hair and a cigar, a pair of Union soldiers, a lieutenant bearing a loosely wrapped parcel, and two finely dressed ladies, elder and younger.

Scobell greeted and introduced him somewhat impressively, he thought: “Here is Lieutenant Barclay Lourdes,” he said, using the rank he'd very briefly held. “He served with distinction at the Siege of Port Hudson.”

At that point the bearded gentleman in the back with the cigar and the wavy hair remarked, “On the Rebel side, wasn't it?”

The room grew cold from the questioning stares that focused on him expectantly.

“Actually,” Barclay said, “I was a lieutenant in the Crescent City Native Guards for the Confederacy, but we were ordered to disband by General Lewis when Admiral Farragut took New Orleans. When General Butler of the Union Army formed the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, I volunteered and fought at Port Hudson under Captain Cailloux. I lost my lieutenant's commission when General Banks replaced all Negro officers with whites. It's a bit confusing, I know.”

He cringed to think back on that day when his old friend Andre Cailloux had been ordered by that fool Banks to lead charge after charge against the Confederate fortifications until he and most of his command had been blown to pieces by earthshaking artillery. Barclay had lain wounded for a day and a night before he had managed to crawl back to the lines. The Rebel sharpshooters had shot anyone who had tried to recover the bodies of Negro soldiers. Andre had lain rotting where he'd fallen until Banks finally took the city forty-seven days later. Every day, looking out on that cratered field, his love of the South had dwindled a little further along with Andre's flesh.

“Galvanized Yankee,” the cigar-smoking man said lowly to the officer, who smirked.

“He was captured and escaped from Belle Isle,” Scobell went on, ignoring the man, “and became one of Allan Pinkerton's agents. He infiltrated Castle Thunder in Richmond just last year and engineered the exchange of one of our most prized operatives. As a matter of fact, he saved her life from execution.”

“My word,” the older of the two ladies said in appreciation.

“What do you know about Camp Sumter prison in Georgia?” the cigar-smoking man asked next, though he still hadn't deigned to introduce himself.

Barclay shrugged.

“Andersonville? Just rumors, really. Despite my recent history, I assure you, prisons aren't really in my line.”

The younger of the two women shrugged past the cigar-smoking man. She was an attractive young woman with girlish auburn locks but overlarge dark, haunted eyes that gave Barclay pause.

She held out her hand, and he took it, touching his forehead to her soft knuckles.

When he straightened to retrieve his hand, she held it tightly and her eyes assumed a penetrating look.

“And yet…magic, the occult. That
is
in your line, is it not, Lieutenant Lourdes? In your family line?”

She closed her eyes then and murmured: “Your father was a runaway slave, a son of slaves, but his blood coursed with ancient power…and your mother was a daughter of queens. Dancing queens all in white. And you yourself kept time with the heartbeat of the gods.”

He had to force his hand from her cold grip, and when she released him, her eyes opened once more.

“Lourdes,” Baker said with a hint of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, “may I introduce Miss Nettie Maynard? She is—”

“I am the first lady's spiritual adviser,” the woman said directly.

Barclay nodded and looked over her head expectantly at the older woman, but she did not come forward and no one made a move to introduce her.

“During a séance two days ago,” Nettie Maynard said without further preamble, “my spirit guide, Doctor Bamford, granted me an apocalypse. I saw this Camp Sumter. I saw a man, a man with an enormous right arm. He drove that monstrous arm into the bowels of the earth until a putrescent red ichor bubbled up in which all manner of horrors swam. I saw the poor downtrodden men in this place drown in its filth, and those that tried to stand above the blood-red waters were dragged down and strangled by the blind things that thrived there.”

“Yes, well,” Baker said lamely.

But Nettie Maynard would not be interrupted, and the rest came out in a breathless torrent.

“I saw the waters spread across the whole country. I saw it lap at the steps of the White House. I saw Washington destroyed in a tide of blood, torn down by clawed hands!”

She nearly shrieked the last, and her big eyes rolled and her eyelids fluttered. She swooned, and one of the soldiers had to catch her.

“Oh, Nettie!” the older woman sobbed, rushing forward to grip her shoulders. “What about Mr. President?”

The other soldier had to extricate the distraught older woman, and the lieutenant ordered them to escort both ladies into the foyer.

As the women exited and one of the soldiers turned to draw the door closed, Nettie called: “He is raising it! Andersonville is an outpost of hell!”

The remaining men and Barclay looked at one another in an embarrassed silence.

“All right, Lieutenant Lourdes,” the man with the cigar said quietly, tapping ash into a brass tray on a nearby stand. “What is your opinion on this matter?”

“Pardon me, but who are you, sir?” Barclay asked, not liking the man's swaggering manner.

“Captain Lafayette Baker,” he rumbled. “I'm taking over Mr. Pinkerton's position.”

“Very well,” Barclay said after a bit. “I think those ladies are somewhat overwrought, and I'm wondering why I'm here.”

“It's nonsense, isn't it?” Baker chuckled.

He hadn't exactly said that. Obviously, the Maynard woman had some sort of spiritual insight. But he really was curious why they had called him to bear witness to it. He wasn't aware that either Pinkerton or Scobell knew anything about his mystic background.

“It is nonsense indeed,” Baker repeated, going to the decanter on the table in the corner and pouring himself a glass of a caramel-colored liquid. “Only two things have even induced me to call such an unlikely individual as a Negro Confederate officer into my presence.”

He pointed to Scobell.

“One is that Mr. Scobell here vouches for your service. And number two,” he said, snapping his fingers at the lieutenant, who handed him the parcel, “is that yesterday, the day after the first lady's séance, I received this parcel through clandestine channels. It is purported to have originated within the prison at Camp Sumter.”

He took from the parcel a daguerreotype, which he held out to Barclay.

It was the portrait of a man sagging in a chair. The man was naked from the waist up, wearing only a pair of striped Union trousers. His upper body was wasted in the extreme. Malnutrition had rendered him such a gruesome wraith, devoid almost of life, that an arm belonging to a Confederate soldier just out of frame was propping the grinning man's oversized head aright.

“This portrait was accompanied by a letter. A letter addressed to you, Lieutenant Lourdes, someone I didn't even know existed before I contacted Mr. Scobell here this morning. The letter, which I have in safekeeping, corroborates Miss Maynard's fantastic vision. It says that a ‘dark power' is rising in Andersonville, a power which could affect the outcome of the war. A power of which the Confederate government is not aware and for which it is not directly responsible.”

Barclay looked over at Scobell.

“It's the God's honest truth, Barclay,” said Scobell.

“Do you want to know what I think?” Baker said, snatching the portrait from Barclay's fingers. “I think you're a turncoat, Lourdes, and that this is all some elaborate ruse by the Confederate intelligence service to call you home. Right now, the only thing keeping you from being shot, the only thing keeping our lovely Miss Maynard from being arrested and tried as your collaborator, is the first lady's overwroughtedness.”

He looked at Barclay pointedly.

Barclay glanced back at the closed parlor door, then at Scobell.

It was then that he realized the older lady in the room had been Mary Todd Lincoln herself.

“On the off chance that you are not a Rebel agent, as Mr. Scobell here emphatically assures me you are not,” Baker went on, “I want to know why this Union soldier is in the horrendous state he is in. I want to know before
Harper's Weekly
gets their hands on this,” he said, waving the grisly portrait. “Mr. Scobell has arranged a cover story for you and a timetable. You'll infiltrate Camp Sumter via a prison train.”

“We want you to make contact with the Rebel operator who sent Captain Baker this parcel,” said Scobell.

“But who sent the parcel, John?” Barclay asked.

“It was signed,” Baker said, watching Barclay closely, “Lieutenant Quitman Goodloe Day.”

“I'll do it,” Barclay said immediately. Demons, hellhounds, and men in league with them.

It was fantastic, but it seemed that Nettie Maynard was the genuine article. Day said God and His angels were sitting this fight out because he couldn't employ his powers. But who then had contacted Nettie Maynard with her vision if not God or some heavenly agent of His? Had God passed over Day's efforts to secure his? And if so, why?